Wired for Sleep: Continuing My Apnea Saga

In a previous post I discussed my first sleep study, which documented my until then undiagnosed problems with sleep apnea. Last night I participated in another sleep study, and the picture on the left depicts me with dozens of electrodes glued to my body.

The purpose of the second study was to evaluate my sleep while wearing a full facial mask supplied with airflow from a Continuous Positive Airway Pressure (CPAP) machine. It took me a while to get used to the mask and the changes in breathing associated with this device, but I eventually wound up with about five hours of decent sleep (I eventually fell asleep while thinking of mundane topics, like types of RV insurance and the number of ceiling tiles in the room). I was actually disappointed when the technicians woke me at 5:30 am, as I would have liked another 3-4 hours of such deep sleep.

Now I wait for the sleep doctor, the medical supply company, and the insurance to finish their haggling. With a little good fortune I will be able to procure a mask and a machine tomorrow, though I suspect the Thanksgiving holiday may delay until next week the commencement of CPAP-aided sleep.

Still, if it improves my quality of life (at least my constant tiredness), it will be worth the wait.

The Quote Shelf

A frequent feature on this site; feel free to comment on the quote or to supply a competing quote.

Even in a perfect world,
Where everyone was equal
I would still own the film rights
And be working on the sequel.

-- Elvis Costello, "Every Day I Write The Book"

Taking in a Red Wings Game at Joe Louis Arena

Photo by historymike

My dad called me yesterday afternoon to inform me of his sudden acquisition of two tickets to see the Detroit Red Wings on home ice at the Joe Louis Arena. Despite the outcome of the game - the WIngs lost 2-1 in overtime to the Florida Panthers - I enjoyed the evening for a number of reasons.

It is always great to spend time with my dad, a person I wish I would have made more time for when I was younger. He is knowledgeable about the game, and he helped me catch up to speed on the 2009-2010 Red Wings, as I have been so absorbed in research and writing that I paid little attention to non-dissertation matters the past four months.

And of course, he is my dad.

Yet this was something of a homecoming for me at Joe Louis, as I managed some of the food and beverage operations for the Ilitch family for eight years after Mike Ilitch bought the team. There were of course many changes, and Olympia Entertainment (the newer name of my old employer) has spent millions over the years improving the facility. When I first started working there in 1982, the building was mostly a drab gray edifice with only the barest of accommodations for patrons. Ilitch continued to pour cash into Joe Louis Arena in the almost 20 years since I moved on, and I was impressed with the amenities.

A 21st century hockey game is of course different from the games I remember from the 1980s, and there are non-stop video and audio components to the way that hockey is packaged for its current fans. This reflects the growing influence of digital consumers, the kind of fans who grew up playing video games and wearing iPods from early ages. Every stop in play means either a multimedia advertisement or some form of on-ice entertainment, and I found it difficult to talk hockey with my dad.

Of course, at age 45 I am on the older edge of the targeted demographics for NHL marketers. It should not be surprising that I found somewhat annoying the sound and visual accoutrements of the modern hockey game, and it is also telling that one of the high points of my visit to Joe Louis Arena was learning that 92-year-old Budd Lynch still serves as the public address announcer.

Yes, I am becoming a fogey, although I am still young enough to be proud that I pranked Budd Lynch by calling in a fake patron page (this was in the days before the omnipresent cellular phones). There is a special joy that a 20-year-old goofball experiences when hearing Budd Lynch make the following announcement during a stoppage in play:

"Dr. Harry Ness, please call your office....Dr. Harry Ness, please call your office."

I figured that the people who passed messages to Budd would be too smart if I used the funnier "Dr. Harry P. Ness." If you do not get the puerile joke, say the names out loud and imagine how it would sound when 2,000 people laugh at your idiocy.

Sigh.

Budd Lynch, I apologize for my shennanigans - you deserved better from a company employee.

Meet Petey, a Rescue Yorkie

Pictured on your left is Petey, an 8-pound Yorkshire terrier mix who was rescued from a local dog pound. We think Petey is about nine months old, and he is a friendly and affectionate little guy who has a lifetime of love to give his forever family.

This puppy has one heck of a rough time the last few weeks, and he contracted parvovirus while in the pound. Petey almost died last week (serious, but not quite the automated external defibrillator ( AED) kind of event), and he is slowly working his way back to good health after a stay in the animal hospital. It will probably be at least two weeks before he is well enough to be adopted. He has already started eating again, and his energy level is close to normal, but we want to make sure that he has truly whooped the dreaded parvo.

Petey bonds quickly with people, and he really enjoys sitting on a couch or chair with his favorite humans. Despite his small size, Petey is surprisingly quite adept at standing up for himself, and he does not allow the bigger dogs to push him around. He also has quite a personality, and he wags his tail and grins when you talk to him as if he understands every word you say.

To learn more about adopting Petey, or if you want to help financially support Planned Pethood's mission to rescue dogs and cats in Northwest Ohio, visit the Planned Pethood website for more information.

Wacky Things Professors Say

My students in one of my courses kept bugging me the last two classes about the semester evaluation, and it was not until after they finished that I learned the reason for their interest. You see, I have a self-deprecating comment when I mis-speak or say something controversial that goes like this: "Make sure you put THAT on the evaluation so the dean and the provost will have a brain aneurysm."

Today they brought in a list of bizarre-sounding statements I made over the course of the semester, and in good fun they shared the list with me. Luckily for them I poke the most fun at myself, and I chuckled as I looked over the meticulous set of statements that - if taken out of context - might have me tossed from the academy or locked in an asylum.

Here, then, are some of the lowlights of a semester teaching labor history, or at least as the students remembered them:

1. "The liberal wing of the modern Democratic party are socialists." This was mentioned to remind students that Progressive-era socialists stood for policies that today would be considered more mainstream, such as an end to child labor and universal suffrage.

2. "In this day and age it is important to have a good package." This statement referred to the use of beautiful people to sell concepts, not the colloquial term for a well-stuffed pair of pants, but it was not until the students started hooting that I realized my rhetorical faux pas.

3. "Pull my finger." I must admit that I uttered this line in response to an image I found of AFL founder Samuel Gompers:

However, in my defense I should add that I initially caught myself from uttering the crude lines, telling the class: "I refrained from putting an inappropriate caption on this image when I designed this PowerPoint." But oh no: they just HAD to keep bugging and pestering me to tell them the redacted punchline, and now I am the bad guy. Sheesh.

4. "Study the Communist Manifesto so that I may convert you all to Marxists." This was a stretch, as my statement was taken from a larger discussion about how educators have to worry about being denounced as radicals for merely inspecting the historical record. Still, the words seem to be in the right order.

5. "I pal around with Marxists, but only because they pay for lunch." This was a wry comnmentary about the current mini-McCarthyism running rampant in American politics, referencing Sarah Palin's comments that Barack Obama spent time "palling around with terrorists" like Bill Ayers. And yes: I have allowed Marxists to buy me lunch on more than one occasion. Call your local chapter of the Young America's Foundation and denounce me as the Marxist pal-around type that I truly am.

6. "I can say that I am situationally dishonest." This was a moment of candor related to...I forget what. It had something to do with robbing banks, and I admitted that if there were no prison penalties for bank robbery, I would take a gym bag down to my local branch and say: "fill 'er up." At the same time I would never think of stealing an old woman's purse or some other crime where the connection was so clear between me and the victim.

But every word captured above was true, and I thank my sharp-eared class for the good-natured list, even noting how I say "but I digress" about every nine lines when I ramble off-topic.

But I digress.

A Workday without Internet and Email

For most of the day I was unable to access my email and Web accounts in my job at Bowling Green State University, a problem that the IT people indicated was due to a severed fiber optic cable in central Ohio. Especially problematic for me in particular is the fact that I am teaching three online sections of history classes, meaning that my courses were essentially dead today.

Luckily for me (though not necessarily for my students), Tuesdays are quite slow, as many online students use the weekend to complete their assignments and take quizzes. Still, it was quite odd to be staring at DNS error messages all day and not being able to visit my course shells, and the outage today was a reminder of just how dependent I have become on computers and computer networks.

Even stranger was the lack of email access, as most of my communication with my students and colleagues occurs via email. I suspect that I have experienced only a few weekday work hours without email access this semester, and today there was a span of over eight hours when messages did not get through to me. Of course, they still piled up and caused a virtual avalanche this afternoon when I finally accessed my account, but it was a rather surreal day for me.

This also happened to be a day when I guest-lectured for an ROTC class at BGSU, giving a brief overview of the history of the Middle East for the next generation of military leaders. So I traveled back in distant time to the era of face-to-face lectures and telephone communications, living the old-school academic life for a day.

And everything worked out in the end.

I'm a Sleep Apneac

I posted late last week about participating in a sleep study to determine if I have sleep apnea, and today I met with the sleep specialist. He confirmed my suspicions about having a sleep disorder, which was not a surprise, but it was the magnitude of the severity of my obstructive sleep apnea that intrigued me.

Specialists developed something called the Apnea-Hypopnea Index (AHI) to measure the number of apneas and hypopneas per hour. Scores above 30 events per hour are classified as severe sleep apnea, and I averaged a whopping 51 events per hour.

My average apnea event lasted 23 seconds in duration, and I have times in my lousy sleep where my oxygen saturation level falls below 90 percent. Put another way, I typically manage to sleep for only 45 seconds or so before my obstructed airways cause a fall in oxygen levels to the point where my body forces me to wake up.

Even simpler was the summation my physician provided: "You probably haven't experienced a decent night's sleep in five years."

So next week I get to repeat the sleep study, except this time I will be fitted with a CPAP machine. Assuming that I show some signs of improvement in the next study, I will get to take the machine home with me. I am looking forward to once again experiencing some semblance of normal sleep, as well as a reduction in the incessant sleepiness that has been my lot for many, many months.

On Lost Keys and the Power of Motivated Search Parties

At some point early last week I lost my keys, and thus began many days spent in frustrated searching for them. I searched all over my house, retraced my steps to a variety of external destinations, and still there was no sign of my keys.

Part of the problem is related to my lack of interest in driving, as the last few trips I made out of the house before losing the keys were while my wife drove. Thus, a span of about three days existed between the times that I definitively knew my keys were missing and when I knew that they were gone.

I hit upon an idea and carried it to fruition that helped solve the mystery today, though. I announced to my visiting children that anyone who found the keys would be the recipient of $25 in reward funds, and within 10 minutes my youngest daughter - who paused from her participation in a live chat - found the keys in the couch cushions. I would have sworn that I thoroughly searched that couch, but found is found.

Besides, I would have spent four times that amount of money in getting new keys and locks made, since three of the keys were for one of my employers, and they charge a hefty fee to replace keys lost by careless employees. Add to this the peace of mind in knowing that my keys have not fallen into criminal hands, and I say that $25 is a small price indeed to pay.

Puggle Wars!

There is not much fighting or barking in this three-for-all between a group of male Puggles, and the lighting is lousy, but you could find worse ways to spend 47 seconds than watching this video of several of my dogs in action.

Oh, the caninity:


The dogs almost always bring a smile to my face when they act this way, unless of course it deprives me of sleep. Such was the case this afternoon, when they recreated Puggle Wars! while I foolishly attempted to take a 10-minute nap.

Studying My Sleep

I have been putting off the sleep tests my physician ordered for a couple of reasons, not the least of which is the fact that I sleep most poorly away from my own bed. However, I am tired of always being tired, and tonight I am taking the somnolent plunge and letting the technicians spend 30 minutes hooking me up to machines that will assess my ability to sleep.

The suspicion is that I have sleep apnea, and I will not be in the least surprised if I add this diagnosis to the other health problems that puzzle me and keep area health specialists gainfully employed. However, the fine folks at the Pulmonary and Critical Care Specialists might actually be able to help me better manage my sleeping difficulties.

Yet I am still skeptical that I will actually sleep tonight, given my existing track record of tossing and turning when I am not in my own bed. And if any of those other insomniacs or apneacs keep me awake tonight, I am going to be doubly irritated tomorrow.

Random Wikiness

When I am looking for inspiration in my writing - or when I am bored beyond redemption - I visit Wikipedia and use the Random Article function. Located on the left sidebar of the main Wikipedia page, clicking the Random Article link sends the visitor into unknown and often fascinating journeys into the accumulated knowledge hundreds of thousands of Wikipedians have generated.

I first found myself on a Wikipedia page about Erprobungskommando, which was a Luftwaffe unit responsible for testing experimental aircraft and weapon designs under operational conditions. Among the more noteworthy devices that the various Erprobungskommando units tested were the Messerschmitt Me 163 rocket fighter and the Messerschmitt Me 262 which was one of the most advanced German aviation designs that reached the operational stage before the end of the Second World War.

My next destination was to a page describing the National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory (NSCL), which is located on the campus of Michigan State University, my wife's first alma mater. Scientists at the NSCL investigate properties of rare isotopes and nuclear reactions, simulating the reactions that take place in stars, novae, and supernovae. However, in my many trips to Lansing in the 1980s to visit the beautiful young woman who later became my wife, the only isotopes I investigated were those that happened to be inside a tequila bottle.

For some reason my random searches kept directing me to pages with technical themes, and I next learned about the Boeing X-37. This is an experimental spaceplane that flew its first flight on April 7, 2006 after being delivered to the edge of space by a White Knight that lifted off from Edwards Air Force Base. This vehicle, part of a classified NASA project, has the potential to become the first operational U.S. military spaceplane, and the X-37 is expected to reach a top velocity up to Mach 25.

But I bet my 1995 Hyundai can kick its arse off the line at a red light, since where the hell are you going to find a gas station that carries the X-37's special fuel blend of hydrogen peroxide and JP-8 around here, Bubba? I think not.

The Quote Shelf

A frequent feature on this site; feel free to comment on the quote or to supply a competing quote.

Permanence, perseverance and persistence in spite of all obstacles, discouragement, and impossibilities: It is this, that in all things distinguishes the strong soul from the weak.

-- Thomas Carlyle